We reach the fourth and final installment of our monumental dissection of the lecture by astrophysicist and Jesuit priest, Father Dr. Manuel Carreira S.J. (100 minutes onwards of the audiovisual material).
Having swept the floor with modern immanentism and demonstrated the inescapable need for theology to give logical meaning to the material cosmos, Father Carreira addresses the last great bastion of secular discourse: the supposed historical war between Faith and Reason. With a relentless historical scalpel, he dissects the great "black legend" of science—the case of Galileo Galilei—and culminates his presentation with the definitive challenge for modern physics: the unfathomable three-dimensional image of the Shroud of Turin.
Faithful to our editorial standard, Father Carreira's responses are literal and exact reproductions extracted from the transcript of his original conference.
Below is the complete audiovisual document for those who wish to verify the sources of this tetralogy:
Dr. María Victoria Ibáñez-Soto: Father, there is a media mantra—repeated ad nauseam in schools and universities—that affirms that the Catholic Church has historically been the number one enemy of scientific progress. And the inescapable paradigm of this story is always Galileo Galilei. What level of historical ignorance does this myth contain?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "I have been told that in a survey among German university students... up to 70 percent thought that Galileo had been tortured by the inquisition and almost 50% affirmed that he had died at the stake. What really happened? If we think now about what was happening five centuries ago... we have to realize something that many people do not know: there was no physics, there was no chemistry, there was no true astronomy... The only thing that existed was "It was the desire to calculate positions of the stars, assuming something that seemed very logical to them... that since the stars are entities of a higher celestial order, they had to be perfect in everything."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: What exactly was the center of the dispute between Galileo and the theologians of Rome? Many believe that it was a war of the blind against the enlightened.
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "Galileo arrives and says: 'Well, it is better to say that the earth goes around the sun because the sun is more important'. Well, very well, if he wants to do the calculations with that hypothesis, no one bothers him, but leave the theologians alone and do not tell them how they have to change and interpret the scripture based on that hypothesis... He could not prove that the earth goes around the sun and therefore, as long as he could not prove it, he should leave them in peace with their interpretations."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: And about the legendary tortures in the dungeons of the Inquisition?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "Was Galileo in prison? Never. When he was in Rome he was a guest in the house of a cardinal. Was he tortured? No one ever touched him. What was the punishment for not keeping his promise to teach the theory as a hypothesis? That he went home and said a few prayers every day. He died with papal blessing, a professed son of the faithful church and assisted by a religious daughter. So the case of Galileo is "much less gruesome than what is often read in newspapers and magazines."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: Another key concept where modern materialist science collides with reality is the concept of the miracle, arguing that accepting a supernatural event destroys the principle of scientific predictability.
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "If God can do something that is not in accordance with the laws of nature then... science collapses. Well, I have a very simple answer: I have this pen here. Can science say with certainty whether within 5 seconds I will have dropped it on my hand or not? No. Is science collapsing because of that? No. So if [science] is so calm about not being able to predict human freedom, why is it going to hinder science by not being able to predict what divine freedom does?"